The Will to Doubt

only tentative acceptance of actual experience, and it is thus in effect an admission of just those limitations which have been found to belong to science as objective and spe

nd does recognize an unknowable, or at least an unknowability in things, and agnosticism is accordingly important among the three determining points of science's circumference. But here is now our problem: Does science put the right value upon, does it ascribe the

ive" world. Their withdrawal is thus not merely physical; it is also mental. To look out of the window one must turn one's head and lift one's eyes and adjust both head and eyes in other ways; but looking in general, whether from the needs of an objective or a special view, also demands certain pertinent adjustments, and the demanded adjustments make the resulting experience just so far aloof, just so far discoloured and distorted. Granted that these terms can be only relative in significance. To be aloof from something is to have it equally aloof

's flying arrow it would just always rest in statu quo, though its status in quo might have an indefinite series of positions. Again, the scientists reduce causation to mere uniformity of co-existences or sequences, which is no real causation at all, being only so much passive existence or mechanical process, while will or action is causation, the positive interaction of things, the active relation, the vital unity, of what was and is and is to be. It is true that here, too, the causation of real life is darkly presented by science in a constant opposition between a single first cause and an eternal series of causes, for such an opposition makes real causation in an important way quite transcendent of the mere differences of time; but, setting this concession aside, who ever did anything in a world either of one cause active long ago or of an infinite series of causes? And, once more, science needs elements, while will or life i

riori forms of all valid, objective knowledge, and being translated this is to say that these so-called forms are the enabling attitudes of the merely looking consciousness or the peculiar glasses which, as it were, the mind puts on whenever it turns just to look. The typical Boston girl, according to the cartoonists, is never without her glasses. In like manner the typically, professionally correct looking consciousness, the observing, scientific mind, is never without those enabling attitudes. Do you ask if they

his agnosticism and try to render what he cannot know in terms of what he does know, or that the man of affairs will look to science for his programmes of action. Such a fear, however, may play to the professional conceits and the professional isolation and abstraction of the scientific point of view, but it is very far from grasping the true import of the conflict between knowledge and unknowable reality. I should myself assert, in partial if not in complete opposition to Professor Münsterberg, that science's very natural danger is that the scientific and the volitional point of view will be kept apart, that the professionalism and the formalism and what Kant called the phenomenalism of science will prevent their interference. At least, this danger is just as great, and j

ope, smiles grimly within himself, and feels sure still that she and he, however disparite, are meant to live together for better or worse. But the rejected scientist takes the unknowable's "No" as if it were final, and then, retiring to his study or laboratory, proceeds, though in a morbid, abnormal way, to mingle the

, and transformations; and in the second place, that it always knows with some measure of sophistication that what it deals with is symbolic or constructed. Conscious creatures, from the moment they begin to draw breath, are trained to see one thing objectively and to understand or construe quite another thing for active expression. There is no visual sensation without muscular sensation, and most men, if not all men, have really learned in the long years of their own and their race's experience to get along without seeing and yet also without foregoing the sensations in their muscles! Man's long training, in a word, has taught him to use what he sees as not direct

a or formula; and many a realistic novel, treating the details of life as a scientist might treat them, or many a psychological novel, more problematic than artistic, has been put upon the market. But what can all this mean, undoubtedly true as it is, save that science belongs to life, yet is applied to it with difficulty and only under conditions of conflict? In the case of the edibles, poverty or illness, both of them incidents of conflict, is responsible for the unnatural substitution, and in cases of education, politics, religion, and literature, the substitution is equally a makeshift which the conditions of conflict impose upon life. An individualistic programme will not work, nor will a purely socialistic programme work. Mere induction will not educate. No visible God ever was divine, and no articulate creed ever was true. Life is a game throughout; its vital character, its very integrity is its experimental character; it is not a settled, abstractly perfect thing. Life is dynamic, not st

ct whatever of violence the sense of symbolism and the sophistication and the humour of the time may be unequal to. Thus in the movements and programmes of society for any given misfit there is always a counter-misfit. Possibly human life, at least as socially organized, is only a competition of misfits, its programmes coming, not through the acquired supremacy of one side or the other, but through the constant mediation, the balancing and interacting of the two, and the misfits are perhaps exclusively the gifts of science or at least of the

lity, being in form quite innocent of a real realism, but after all, whether by itself or in its various applications or renderings in human life, it is so innocent only in a qualified sense, only with reference to the form of its specific doctrine and attitudes taken individually. As itself a living whole, part acting upon part, each abstraction corrected by some counter-abstraction or perhaps by some inner sel

tories and their books and their own pet doctrines, and they have also their social affiliations in business and in politics and in religion; and, whether it be ideal or unideal, admirable or reprehensible, their life certainly does seem double, because their sociology and their business, or their political theory and their party ties, or their biology and their religion simply will not mix; but their apparent duplicity has apparently little or nothing to rest upon. It may count as two, numerically, but such counting never makes being. Men should count less and think more. On the terms of such a numerical separation, as was said, the science can be only formal, the life only dead; but such a science and such a life make one existence, not two; and, however amusing the conclusion may be, it is nevertheless true that the science, for just what

e may have no less, but also it has no more justification than a protected industry. Competition with life and will may often bring science low, degrading its methods and impairing

d of his interest, of his formal knowledge, includes, among the other things, that which he knows to be unknowable, and with the inclusion and the knowledge of unknowability he imagines his responsibility to the unknowable both to begin and end. Or, again, the agnostic scientist regards the unknowable as something apart from the knowable, as something not for him to know and also not having any vital, intrinsic relations to what he does know, but something nevertheless objectively presentable to a creature with knowing faculties altogether different from his. The unknowable is thus for him still the object of a looking and thinking consciousness, yet never of his looking and thinking consciousness; it is knowable, and formally knowable, yet not to him, not through any

unknowable, or it may be instrumental, esteeming the unknowability in things, not merely as relative to the existing conditions of knowledge, but also as a constant demand upon science that it never rest in itself, that it for ever treat its results as only a means t

is mind. What he knows, however well established in his actual, positive consciousness, is at best only relative and mediative. But-and just here appears the defect of his position, or just here we see him still only the professional scientist-the mediation which absorbs his interest is merely one of formal knowledge; what he knows always leads him just to more knowledge; his formulated hypotheses as they are tested are but aids to new formulations: whereas, besides this mediation, there always is another at least equally significant, for knowledge under the ver

emote yet-to-be-known, for its being always, or its being infinitely distant, simply makes it something besides positive knowledge actual or possible. It must mean something which, though not knowledge, is nevertheless in knowledge, now and always; something served by all knowledge but itself other than any knowledge; something, then, which exceeds or transcends whatever the formal enabling conditions of knowledge are capable of presenting, but is itself intimately and vitally involved in the presentation; or, once more, something which is not at all in the character of a separate unknowable thing or sphere of things, nor even of a separate part in the things known or knowable, but is in the character

ould in just so far remove and deny the intrinsic character of the activity; in just so far it would set the supposedly active being in fixity of life and definiteness of form. For an essentially active nature, therefore, all things-all things in heaven and earth-are both present and possible, and so, specifically, if that active nature be the knowing mind there can be no unknowable that is at the same time alien and altogether impossible to the knower. Even the very forms of the knower's knowledge must for ever compass pass more than they may visibly present. The knowing itself in its own right and nature must be more than formal knowing, or than the "objective," "special" science, in which the formal knowing has its professional realization. And the knower, as he knows, in and through his knowledge must always be compassing just that which is not impossible to him, but only unknowable-that is, impos

making castes out of the social classes of those who look and those who do, the unknowable must be taken to point to the necessary unity of knowledge and life, of theory and practice, to the fact that all looking is incident to a running and before a leaping, that all knowledge is responsible to life, and that only life, how

sentimentally ideal, but also the inevitable, the inner and actually real motive, the natural outcome of the scientific standpoint in each one of its three attitudes. Such a showing might follow histori

to consciousness. The undivided universe, however, as present to consciousness, is a call for will, since it cannot be fully realized in any formal consciousness. The natural decline of an asserted specialism, then, or the development of specialism into a mere form without substance, into a virtual universalism, makes science applicable. It makes science applicable, for in the first place it gives freedom from the bondage of mere special technique, just as, for example, the decline of religious-or irreligious?-sectarianism, a form of specialism certainly, is sure to free religion from the bondage of ritual, and in the second place, as was the fate of objectivism, it makes the distinction between self and not-self, subject and object, man and nature, only a formal one, since the real unity of the objective world is exactly that in which the self has its true realization. In like manner a religion turned non-sectarian shows man truly living and moving and having his being, not aloof from God, but in God. Thirdly, whether because of the freedom from technique or ritual or because, as the waters of science become quiet with the union of its many streams, the objective world does clearly mirror the image of the self, the decline of specialism, like the decline of sectarianism, brings what some are pleased to call the liberation of the human spirit. The psychologist would call it the development of knowledge

entific is always artificial and symbolic, and is in particular, as we have found, always a poise between opposing points of view,[4] I must bring to an end this rather lengthy examination of th

a caste, and logically it involves abstraction and consequent division against itself. Its most cherished ideals, as shown in its attitudes and methods, are

rmed doubters. We doubt the formal attitude and the formal doctrines just because they are abstract, phenomenal, paradoxical, but at the same time we have to believe in the spirit-there seems to be no other word available-as an ever-present agent of validity, because, in spite of all, the very incongruities save these formal doctrines from their apparent artificiality and abstraction, and put them in touch with what is whole and real. And if, as was suggested, the scientific

al Science-A Fatal Parallelism," in the Phil

in the Logic of the Early Greek Philosophy-Being, not-Being, and Becoming," in the Monist, Vol. XII, No. 3, April, 1902; a

ology and Life, p. 267. Hou

dpoint, of will as involving such a poise, see Münsterberg's